People come away from Finch having really felt something, and that’s incredibly meaningful.” “It’s harder to do something with any sort of hope or lightness for many reasons, but when it hits, you can see how people react. “The surprising thing was that I’ve done a lot of dark stuff, and doing something that’s not dark is so much harder,” Sapochnik says. After Thrones, the director turned his attention back to Finch. Critics noted that Sapochnik’s quiet, dramatic scenes were every bit as powerful as his staging of spectacle, and he took home two Emmys for his work on the show. He pulled off an acclaimed battle sequence in 2015’s “Hardhome,” then helmed what’s arguably one of the best action sequences of all time in season six’s “Battle of the Bastards.” Thrones producers and cast praised Sapochnik’s tirelessness focus amid torturous night shoots (the director famously only permitted himself one bathroom break per day while shooting).
After he joined Thrones in season five, Sapochnik’s episodes immediately popped. The 47-year-old English director got his start in the industry as a storyboard artist (his credits include 1996’s Trainspotting) who then began directing television ( Fringe, House, Mind Games), as well as the 2010 feature film Repo Men. “The world’s been going through a lot of turmoil and we realized we didn’t want to add to it, we wanted to somehow find some meaning in all the chaos.” “There’s this line, ‘Hope is what keeps us alive,’ and it felt like we needed to lean into that,” Sapochnik says during a Zoom call from Spain, where he’s directing and co-showrunning the Thrones prequel House of the Dragon. But then, just as postproduction was about to wrap, the pandemic shut down the industry and the filmmakers found themselves in an entirely unforeseen situation of telling a dark, post-apocalyptic tale amid a real-life global tragedy.
Finch has an Oscar winner acting alongside a canine and an android, and the audience needs to become fully invested in all three. Saturday Night' to Close on Broadway in Septemberįilming was always going to be tricky.